The Art of Plague and Panic: Marseille, 1720
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In the now-shuttered Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseille hang two huge paintings depicting the Great Plague that ravaged France’s most important Mediterranean port exactly three hundred years ago. Made on the spot by royal artist Michel Serre, these images spotlight an ugly human tendency: to blame contagion on the same “foreigners” who are often tasked with containing it. They also suggest how fears about global commerce, associated both with the 1720 outbreak and a concurrent financial bubble based on New World speculation, figure in the long history of pandemics.
Figure 1. Michel Serre, View of the Hôtel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720, c. 1721. Oil on canvas, 3.06 x 2.77 meters. Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, BA 52. Photograph: RMN/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 2. Michel Serre, View of the Cours during the Plague of 1720, c. 1721. Oil on canvas, 3.17 x 4.4 meters. Marseille, Musée des Beaux-Arts, BA 53. Photograph: RMN/Art Resource, NY.
Serre was chief painter for the royal galleys, a once majestic fleet of oared vessels that, by this period, served mainly to symbolize France’s power and prestige. As pestilence spread rapidly through Marseille that spring, many of his colleagues fled or perished. He stuck around to document the disaster and oversee efforts to clear away the rotting cadavers that littered city streets.
Dead bodies dominate both of Serre’s canvases: one set at the portside City Hall, where officials met to discuss trade, and the other portraying an upscale residential boulevard known as the Cours. Pale, bloodless figures lie in gutters, clump around trees, pile up in carts, and drape off wharves. Thrust into the cramped, chaotic scenes, a viewer almost smells decaying flesh and hears anguished screams. In one corner, Serre himself appears in a rowboat, drawing utensils in hand. Gentlemen on horseback direct the dirty work of carting off the dead.
The individuals performing this perilous labor are convicts and so-called “enslaved Turks”—rowers captured and purchased from Islamic lands—who were promised freedom for taking part in the cleanup. The irony is that some of these galley slaves came from the same part of the world where locals believed the plague had originated: the “East,” roughly meaning the Ottoman Empire and its North African affiliates. European stereotypes had long associated Islam with despotism and contagion. What a physician in Marseille dubbed the “Oriental plague” was the “Chinese virus” of its day.
“Serre’s urban portraits. . . . reveal the powerless individuals who helped mitigate disaster while those in power pointed fingers or stood still.”
Most people in eighteenth-century Marseille blamed the outbreak on infected bales of Anatolian cloth shipped from the eastern Mediterranean and unloaded without a proper quarantine, despite reports of crew members and passengers (including a “Patient Zero” who had embarked at Tripoli) dying on board. The cargo had received special treatment because one of its owners happened to be the city’s deputy mayor. He was hoping to sell the prized textiles at an annual trade fair in Provence.
More generally, French men and women blamed the epidemic on foreigners and foreign trade. Serre may have wanted to reference such xenophobia by giving his most conspicuous corpse bearers the darkest skin. One bare-chested, shackled man toting a pallet in the City Hall canvas has the dark complexion that European artists sometimes used to demarcate Muslims. One porter with his back turned in the Cours picture has the shaved head and distinctive hair tuft of a Muslim rower. Their prominence belies the fact that enslaved Turks made up a tiny percentage of the galley slaves supplied for corpse removal, as Serre well knew. His paintings reveal that the supposed agents of plague were among those coerced into keeping it at bay.
Figure 3. Michel Serre, View of the Hôtel de Ville of Marseille during the Plague of 1720, detail of galley slave with dark skin.
Figure 4. Michel Serre, View of the Cours during the Plague of 1720, detail of galley slave with distinctive hair tuft associated with Muslim rowers.
The majority died trying. Galley slaves hauled off thousands of cadavers, dug improvised graves, worked in slaughterhouses and grain distribution centers and staffed makeshift hospitals. Of almost seven hundred conscripted by the crown, just over two hundred survived, many of them denied manumission. If not for their sacrifice, the mortality rate in the city would have been higher. By the time the epidemic subsided two years later, some 50,000 residents, approximately half the population, were dead.
A contagion with different roots simultaneously swept through Marseille in 1720. In this case it was a financial crisis instigated by another “malevolent foreigner”: John Law. This Scottish gambler had assumed control of France’s ruined economy and colossal debt after the death of King Louis XIV in 1715. He convinced the Regent to establish a royal banking system that issued newfangled paper currency and sold shares in a joint-stock trading venture known as the “Mississippi Company.” Its spokesmen cajoled investors into believing they would reap the profits of gold and tobacco planted by convicts and enslaved Africans in French colonial Louisiana and grow rich beyond their wildest imaginings.
Many shareholders did make a fortune, and the term millionaire was coined to describe them. Yet as New World speculation grew more frenzied—and profits failed to appear—the French government printed more and more paper money without metal coinage to back it up. In May 1720, the bubble burst.
The collapse of Law’s system occurred the same week that the ship with infected cloth arrived in Marseille. Artists and authors around Europe took notice. A Dutch series of satirical prints ridiculed the John Law scheme, and explicitly linked financial collapse and illness. In his fictionalized Journal of the Plague Year (1722), English writer Daniel Defoe judged both catastrophes as retribution for promoters of global commerce and urban capitalism. Unlike Serre, though, few commentators acknowledged the forced labor behind Law’s scheme or the sufferings of society’s most marginal members. Like today, they were the ones with the most to lose.
Figure 5. Anonymous, The Tower of Babel of the Confused Stockholders, from the Dutch series Het groote Tafereel der dwaasheid (“The Great Mirror of Folly”), 1720. In this satirical print, John Law sells “bad shares” in the form of poisonous hotcakes to investors, who fall sick after eating them and either collapse or defecate on the ground. To the left, a ruined share trader dives headfirst from a building, while in the background a darkened Tower of Babel underscores the sense of chaos. Etching and engraving, 35.4 x 40 cm. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
The financial fallout did not stem from the plague but it worsened its effects in Marseille. Seduced by Law’s System, many residents had exchanged their gold and silver for bank notes. After the currency was devalued, they could not afford to leave the city or even buy food.
Serre’s dystopian vision of the formerly ritzy Cours—now a bleak corridor of near empty buildings with a shrouded corpse dangling from one window—evokes a world upended, at once contaminated and decontaminated by convicts and slaves. It also stands as a warning against unregulated greed, given that the street housed elite citizens whose fortunes derived from global trade. A cluster of seemingly helpless city officials in the painting’s center includes the owner of the ship that had brought plague to Marseille.
Their frozen forms contrast with the dynamic bodies of the galley slaves and a blue-robed bishop who mixes with the crowd, offering benediction to the living and the dead. Six months into the epidemic, he performed Mass on that very spot. Preaching to throngs of citizens flouting government directives about what today we call social distancing, he blamed the plague on “impiety, irreligion, bad faith, usury [and] monstrous luxury.”
Figure 6. Michel Serre, View of the Cours during the Plague of 1720, detail of Marseille’s bishop comforting the dead and dying.
Some listeners may have become believers that day, but their city’s commercial isolation was short-lived. By 1723, when Serre’s paintings were exhibited in Paris, global commerce had resumed in Marseille. The Mississippi Company had been reorganized and was beginning to see profits, thanks largely to the transatlantic slave trade. No government or bank officials were punished, and Europeans continued to blame religious and ethnic outsiders for the outbreak.
Serre’s portraits propose links between epidemics and foreign commerce, including the traffic in human beings. At the same time, they reveal the powerless individuals who helped mitigate disaster while those in power pointed fingers or stood still.
When the dust clears from our own crisis, how will we honor the economically precarious men and women—the janitors, cashiers, nurses and delivery drivers, some of them the same undocumented immigrants President Trump accuses of threatening the health and prosperity of America—forced to do dangerous work to keep us afloat?
